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it helps even if you don’t believe it Getting tired of the idolatry of the contemporary cosmology (and theoretical physics in its base), see my earlier thoughts [101031] and [110313], I’ve decided to look for a help from the fathers of quantum physics. And, yes, Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg was a real treat to read, reinforcing my belief that theoretical physics of the last thirty or so years has drifted into religious grounds. I don’t know if the fathers of quantum physics were aware of the danger, I sense they did, but they surely paid close attention to the relationship between science and religion. In his treatise Physics and Beyond, Heisenberg brings a lovely story about an informal evening meeting of Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac and himself, in a lounge of the hotel during the Solvay Conference 1927.The discussion on religion and faith in general was initiated by a remark on Einstein’s talking of God, but soon developed into lengthy rebuffing between Dirac vs Heisenberg and Pauli. Namely, Dirac was a hard core atheist, using statements well known from the communist ideology, like "religion is a kind of opium ... to forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people". Pauli was provoked, finally, to jokingly comment: "Well, our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is: ‘There is no God and Dirac is His prophet’." They all laughed, including Dirac. Some time later, probably in Copenhagen, Heisenberg told Niels Bohr about that discussion. "I think Dirac did well", Bohr said, "to warn you so forcefully against the danger of self-deception and inner contradictions; but Wolfgang was equally right when he jokingly drew Dirac’s attention to the extraordinary difficulty of escaping this danger entirely." Niels closed the conversation with one of those stories he liked to tell on such occasions: "One of our neighbors in Tisvilde once fixed a horseshoe over the |
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door to his house. When a mutual acquaintance asked him, ‘But are you really superstitious? Do you honestly believe that this horseshoe will bring you luck?’, he replied ‘Of course not; but they say it helps even if you don’t believe it’."
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